PPC motherboard A1222 "Tabor" revealed

[Daedalus]

Originally Posted by rave

That price tag!
In this day and age, for something so niche?

In technology, the more niche something is, the more expensive it becomes. We're spoiled by the huge mass production of electronics these days, and the fact that big companies can pour millions into development when they can guarantee to shift millions of units, but that's obviously not going to work in Amigaland.

For a little bit of context: I work for a medical devices company where development cycles are long and slow. We still have machines in the field based on standard 486 boards running QNX. However, only one particular board will do, and the price we pay for those boards make even the X1000 look like a bargain. But that's what happens when your market is about 100 units worldwide. It's a fraction of the power of the A1222, and costs nearly 10 times more. Now *that's* niche!

[rave]

Oh I absolutely agree,
I know from friends doing small manufacturing runs that if you can't buy in bulk or have mass production the price increases dramatically.
I just don't know how many of us have that kind of spare cash floating around to purchase such a device.

[Daedalus]

Yep, I have too many hobbies vying for what little disposable income I have to justify it myself - not to mention getting married at the end of the year (an expensive proposition in Ireland!) I just have to hope my A1-XE holds itself together for the foreseeable future...

[wawa]

Originally Posted by iggybeans

The cure to the problem is easy, btw.

Once these first 1000 boards are sold, design a board that supports a PPC with a standard fpu.
The price increase would amount to about $10 in parts.

I'm willing to wait AND pay a slight premium (which in this case could be really slight).

brilliant! and who shall buy the first batch os 1000 crippled boards when a fully functional replacement for almost same price is expected?

or are you suggesting aou would buy both boards in order to support the development? and if so why not just trash the current design, and instead of still pumping money in the production, invest the money in redesign and sell for the double price. that would be still more reasonable that stubbornly sticking to apparently failed idea for whatever reason.

[wawa]

Originally Posted by Daedalus

In technology, the more niche something is, the more expensive it becomes. We're spoiled by the huge mass production of electronics these days, and the fact that big companies can pour millions into development when they can guarantee to shift millions of units, but that's obviously not going to work in Amigaland.

For a little bit of context: I work for a medical devices company where development cycles are long and slow. We still have machines in the field based on standard 486 boards running QNX. However, only one particular board will do, and the price we pay for those boards make even the X1000 look like a bargain. But that's what happens when your market is about 100 units worldwide. It's a fraction of the power of the A1222, and costs nearly 10 times more. Now *that's* niche!

if you really look for excuses you will sure find some. your comparison looks like these os4 hardware were comparable to neccesarily highly dependable medical devices where all kinds of responsibilities, maintenance, specialized techniques and the like certainly add the extra cost. next time you will compare os4 hardware with the space tech. i just imagine a crt or a space rover staff suddenly facing a grim reaper or request to port and compile the neccesary software themselves, just in a most critical moment.

as for niche and hobby, if you make it expensive, it will be that, but not neccesarily. you can collect rolls-royces. but you can also buy a vampire fpga from majsta for about 100$ or build an aros machine for the same amount. its your choice. dont tell others that it is some requirement.

[Daedalus]

Really wawa, do you not have anything else to do than take every possible opportunity to make negative comments about anything OS4-related you can find on the various forums? I don't understand why you feel the need - everyone's already painfully aware of your opinions, and if OS4 isn't your hobby then why expend so much energy on it?

I'm not trying to look for excuses - the reasons are plain to see, but it's interesting how you say things like that as if I should be ashamed of it. Same tired old story from you. I'm not telling anyone that anything is a requirement, again you're being ridiculous there and trying to make it look like it's me that's way out. Other people's Amiga-related hobbies are just as valid as yours, and you should really just accept that and move on. A Vampire FPGA won't run OS4 and well you know it, so I don't know what relevance that has for someone whose hobby is OS4.

As it happens, the board I'm talking about isn't some magical, dependable, future-proofed board or space tech. It's standard PC motherboard tech from around 1993. Nothing special about them. We have to buy them at such a high price because of the small numbers involved, that's all. They constantly fail due to age, but those boards are the only possibility for repairing machines in the field. They also suffer hard drive failures, RAM failures and CPU failures typical of PCs of that age.

[wawa]

A Vampire FPGA won't run OS4 and well you know it, so I don't know what relevance that has for someone whose hobby is OS4.

it runs amiga os afaik. simply an example, that hobby, low numbers or hand crafted projects do not need to equal expensive even on amiga. it is a question of chosen policy.

As it happens, the board I'm talking about isn't some magical, dependable, future-proofed board or space tech. It's standard PC motherboard tech from around 1993. Nothing special about them. We have to buy them at such a high price because of the small numbers involved, that's all. They constantly fail due to age, but those boards are the only possibility for repairing machines in the field. They also suffer hard drive failures, RAM failures and CPU failures typical of PCs of that age.

well, that pretty much resembles the situation os4 and their remaining user base have manouver themselves into, i must admit.

[iggybeans]

Originally Posted by trixster

That price indeed. Alsolutely bonkers.

Not nearly as bad as $2K for the X5000, and I am considering that one.

If they dropped the idea of fpu emulation for Tabor, and just recompiled software for the spe fpu, then some of the penalty involved in using this cpu would be alleviated.

[Megol]

Originally Posted by Schoenfeld

The P1022 is a dual-core CPU. Even if you were to emulate all FPU commands in software, you'd have a spare core to do that, as OS4 is still a single-core OS.

Have you ever tried something like that? The synchronization overheads would be extreme unless there is special hardware support for it, it would be faster emulating it in the main core.

Besides, it's not all-incompatible, but throws a few illegal instruction traps on commands not implemented (according to one of the developers I talked to last saturday). That's about the same as what the 060 CPU does for unimplemented commands of the earlier members of the 68k group. Would you make fun of those who designed with the 060 back then? Surely not.

The e500v2 core uses a special instruction set: SPE (which BTW makes it impossible to support Altivec on a follow-up core as the instruction encodings overlap) which uses the main register file for floating point data.

It should be obvious to anyone who have done something remotely similar that emulating a standard FPU with such a system would be dog slow, not only do one need to trap instructions one also need to swap register values around to emulate the FP registers.
Sure, with a lot of effort one could use a binary translation approach to increase performance - but then one could use an x86 core instead and get much better performance for a lower cost.

And the price? Incredible. Why not make an effort to make a good PPC emulator for a standard PC instead?

Edit: "skilled in the arts" changed - I've read to many patents lately :/)

[iggybeans]

Originally Posted by wawa

brilliant! and who shall buy the first batch os 1000 crippled boards when a fully functional replacement for almost same price is expected?

or are you suggesting aou would buy both boards in order to support the development? and if so why not just trash the current design, and instead of still pumping money in the production, invest the money in redesign and sell for the double price. that would be still more reasonable that stubbornly sticking to apparently failed idea for whatever reason.

Yep, that DOES look problematic, doesn't it.
So the alternative is playing down the flaw and continuing with this design even after the first 1000 are sold.
Because you don't want to upset the buyers of the Tabor design by introducing a better solution after selling this one to them.

See just how convoluted this is going to get.
A) admit you were wrong, scrap a lot of development work, and start over or...
B)carry on and hope that the end results don't tarnish your image too much

Neither solution is optimal.

[wawa]

Originally Posted by iggybeans

Neither solution is optimal.

the situation isnt optimal to start with, which should motivate people for finding solutions rather than the opposite. There is always minimax or lesser evil, if you will.

[Samurai_Crow]

PPC + FPGA = Hardware FPU and classic AGA + enhanced features in the FPGA and still running OS4. Can we hope?

[ppcamiga1]

Originally Posted by Megol

And the price? Incredible. Why not make an effort to make a good PPC emulator for a standard PC instead?

Because it will be PC. For PC We have windows.

[jbenam]

Originally Posted by ppcamiga1

Because it will be PC. For PC We have windows.

That's why the right question should be "Why not for ARM, which is plentiful, powerful and cheap"?

[Samurai_Crow]

@ppcamiga1
Uh oh. My Mac doesn't have Windows but it has Linux on a VirtualBox appliance... I'll just have to settle for Linux FS-UAE since I'm still running Snow Leopard which is too old for the latest FS-UAE... None of my other systems have Windows either.

Wait a minute... Linux hardware running FS-UAE is dead simple and common! No rarity there! What support is there for running Windows or MacOSX on the Tabor board? Basically none. Emulation wins!

Originally Posted by jbenam

That's why the right question should be "Why not for ARM, which is plentiful, powerful and cheap"?

Uh... Plentiful and cheap at least. My RasPi 2 isn't that powerful...

[iggybeans]

Originally Posted by wawa

the situation isnt optimal to start with, which should motivate people for finding solutions rather than the opposite. There is always minimax or lesser evil, if you will.

I'd settle for a Mac Mini.
Or some other low cost solution, if I have to accept this much reduction in capability.

OR pay the premium for a X5000.

[jbenam]

Originally Posted by Samurai_Crow

Uh... Plentiful and cheap at least. My RasPi 2 isn't that powerful...

The Pi 2 uses a fairly low power CPU, but some of the recent Cortex A72s out there are plenty powerful:

http://www.phonearena.com/news/ARM-d...-phone_id68632

I'm pretty sure that a Core M (and thus an ARM Cortex-A72) is more powerful than the Dual Core used on the Tabor. Honestly, PowerPC doesn't make any sense nowadays and using it only shows short-sightedness and/or rose-tinted nostalgia glasses.

[wawa]

Originally Posted by jbenam

The Pi 2 uses a fairly low power CPU, but some of the recent Cortex A72s out there are plenty powerful:

http://www.phonearena.com/news/ARM-d...-phone_id68632

I'm pretty sure that a Core M (and thus an ARM Cortex-A72) is more powerful than the Dual Core used on the Tabor. Honestly, PowerPC doesn't make any sense nowadays and using it only shows short-sightedness and/or rose-tinted nostalgia glasses.

what is nostalgic about some ppc board??

[jbenam]

Originally Posted by wawa

what is nostalgic about some ppc board??

That they want to follow up the PowerPC tradition from the post-Commodore days (1996) while it's clear that the PowerPC days are over.

[eXeler0]

Originally Posted by jbenam

The Pi 2 uses a fairly low power CPU, but some of the recent Cortex A72s out there are plenty powerful:

http://www.phonearena.com/news/ARM-d...-phone_id68632

I'm pretty sure that a Core M (and thus an ARM Cortex-A72) is more powerful than the Dual Core used on the Tabor. Honestly, PowerPC doesn't make any sense nowadays and using it only shows short-sightedness and/or rose-tinted nostalgia glasses.

You see no issues with the fact that OS4 is written for PPC and 0% of the software (OS or apps) can run on the ARM architecture? It took them a decade to release 4.1 (from 4.0) so its not like OS development is lightning fast as it is.
So how would it help to release a new mobo with an ARM chip?
If the solution is to emulate in software then its even more pointless as there already is ppc support in WinUAE and that requires zero new hardware for anyone with a ppc.